DECONSTRUCTING HARRY

INRODUCTION: Another Woody Allen flick comes and goes without making an impression on the cinema going public. How did this man become so famous? Does anyone go to see his films? If a Woody Allen movie is screened in a cinema and nobody is there to see it, is it still disappointing? 

SYNOPSIS: Harry is a successful novelist who offends his friends and family by plundering his life for material for his books. Things come to a head when he is honoured by the university that once expelled him, for the flimsiest of reasons, that he attempted to give the dean's wife an enema. Arriving with a corpse, a Day-Glo PVC clad prostitute, and his kidnapped son, his life starts to fall apart. Until, that is, his character start appearing to him and showing him how to be a better person. 

REVIEW: This is the age of the post-modern movie. We've had the ironic slasher flick ("Scream"), the ironic sci-fi blockbuster ("Starship Troopers"), the ironic film noir ("Wild Things") and now we have the ironic Woody Allen film. 

This is Woody's most self aware film to date, and it plays to all the elements of the post-modern ethos. Woody is inviting us to associate him with the offensive character he plays, an extension of the similar tactic employed by Nicholson in "As Good As It Gets" for which he won another best actor Oscar. The rest of the impressive cast is completely wasted in small parts, badly written and, in the ultimate insult, the Oscar winning Robin Williams is purposely out of focus for all his scenes. 

The flimsiest of plots, despite being lifted direct from Dicken's 'A Christmas Carol', is bulked out by short stories from the author's cannon, but it is never really tied together, and one is left with a feeling of emptiness, due to the lack of cohesion. Edited to highlight the authors disconnection from reality the film jumps all over the place, characters go out of focus and the cast is switched midway through scenes. 
So what we have here is, apparently, a deliberately flimsy plot with a deliberately unlikeable lead, filmed with deliberately bad acting, camera techniques, editing and continuity, unless of-course it actually is a bad movie and I'm just reading too much into it. 

The title demonstrates its debt to post-modern philosopher and founder of Deconstructionism Jacque Derrida whose theories enthuse the film. Derrida has spent years condemning the Logocentric world in which Harry finds himself enmeshed, a world that promotes the spoken word above the written. Surely hell, quite literally it would appear, for an author like Harry who has deconstructed the binary opposition between his real and written worlds, to the point where he at times seems unable to distinguish between them. 

Released simultaneously with "Wild Man Blues", a documentary about the real Woody, this film would seem to mark the final extension of Woody's self-referential angst flicks. "I'm OD'ing on myself" as he says on the film. Woody has, it would seem, plumbed the depths and found there was nowhere left to go with himself as a character. No bad thing. Personally I always preferred the funny earlier ones, but one is left wondering where Woody will go next. 

Ultimately, like its main protagonist, the film is too flawed to achieve greatness, but it is none the less entertaining.  One for Woody fans, if indeed there are any. 

Mutt's Rating: ? 

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